We see ghostly shadows in Price’s photos, and outright madness in Case-Hofmeister’s “After the Assassination.” These are postcards of things we weren’t meant to see, things we won’t soon forget. We find hints of tension and unease: Curran Hatleberg’s nighttime shot of an elderly white couple glowering at a biracial couple in front of a garish, overgrown azalea bush. In them, we witness the malaise of travel: Rory Mulligan’s black-and-white images of an old-model sedan in different weather Justine Kurland’s photo of a shirtless man draped over a motorcycle. Presented at that scale, the pictures seem to hold secrets they require you to lean in and take a closer look. The wall opposite these large-scale projections is mostly blank, except for a series of postcard-sized photographs backed by aluminum and set on ledges like a distant line of train cars. Photo by Justine Kurland (courtesy the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York) These videos push the boundaries of road photography by pointing to urgent motives outside of our romanticized vision of the open road and beyond the artist’s control. Johanna Case-Hofmeister’s 14-minute video “ Go By Feel” juxtaposes a scene of cowboys burning a mattress with a woman’s harrowing story of her mother running through the woods after being set on fire by her deranged boyfriend. “You walk down the street an innocent black man, and you getting stopped and frisked for no reason,” says an aspiring rapper rolling a blunt in the backseat of an SUV in Hannah Price’s 20-minute experimental documentary “ Blueprint” (2014). The photographs and videos in Anthology: Somewhere Not Here, the current group exhibition at Crosstown Arts, point to different reasons to light out for open territory, different types of journeys, and a different vision of the other. The idea is to locate something new - the “other” - that might illuminate or reinvigorate the things we thought we knew back home. The gaze is most commonly male, white, and aloof (think Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, Alec Soth). MEMPHIS - The American tradition of road photography has typically captured a certain spirit of adventure, a search for unexpected beauty, oddity, maybe even enlightenment out there in the far corners of the country. Photo by Dru Donovan (courtesy the artist)
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